Mulayam’s failure charge false and baseless: Mayawati

Lucknow, Feb 15 (IANS) Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Mayawati Friday hit out at her bete noire and Samajwadi Party president Mulayam Singh Yadav, terming as “false and baseless” his charge that her government was a “complete failure”. A day after former chief minister and Leader of Opposition Yadav described her government as a “complete failure”, Mayawati was clearly bent upon paying him back in the same coin.

Replying to the debate on the governor’s address in the house during the budget session, Mayawati began her 90-minute speech with the assertion: “All charges levelled by the leader of opposition Mulayam Singh Yadav are false and baseless”.

Interestingly, both Mulayam and his younger brother Shivpal Yadav, who is state chief of the party, chose to stay away from the house.

In a sarcastic remark, the chief minister and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief added: “It is a pity that Mulayam has failed to rise above petty considerations of his family, friends and his pocket-borough.”

She said: “I would like to draw the attention of the leader of the opposition to the lawlessness that prevailed during his regime; it was only after my government came to power that we were able to restore the semblance of law and order in the state.”

She said: “Mulayam had found a simple way to fudge crime statistics during his tenure in office - by ensuring that criminal complaints were not registered.” She added: “On the contrary, the first directive that I issued after assuming power was that all first information reports (FIRs) were to be registered at all costs.”

She also said how she had gone to the extent of filing FIRs that were not registered during Mulayam’s regime. “As many as 9,000 FIRs were registered in over a month’s time of such criminal cases that were earlier denied. But at the same time I directed the police to carefully weed out fake and motivated FIRs - which ended up in quashing of about 2,500 such cases.”

Refuting Mulayam’s charge that her government was targeting Samajwadi Party activists, Mayawati said: “The fact that we have gone to the extent of quashing so many FIRs should suffice to prove our objectivity.”

Responding to Mulayam’s charge of rampant corruption in the present government, Mayawati said: “Take any senior officer in my government - be it the cabinet secretary, the chief secretary, home secretary or the director general of police - they all enjoy high reputation and are known for their integrity and honesty.”

She also said: “It is because of our transparency in dealing with corruption cases and because we have neither anything to hide nor anyone to shield that we had transferred the investigation in some of the key cases to the CBI (Central Bureau of Investigation).”

She also wondered: “Why was Mulayam Singh Yadav opposing our move to transfer such scams to CBI?”

Coming out strongly in defence of her dream project - the Rs.400 billion Ganga Expressway to run from the eastern most corner of the state to Noida on the threshold of Delhi - Mayawati said: “Contrary to the wild allegations that the project would lead to acquisition of hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land, what we have worked out is a total of only 28,510 hectares of which the bulk is non-agricultural land.”